Hello! I am Jimmy Oakley. Welcome to my New Health Education video series. This is video number two. The title of this video is Addiction Start Because of an Inability to Accept Suffering as an Intimate Part of Life.
Medical research shows two major causes of physical addiction. First your cells adapt to the drug and second your metabolism becomes more efficient. To your cells the drugs you are using become a way of life. Every time you use a drug, your blood carries it to every cell in your body. Your cells adjust. They grow to except these doses on schedule. Your cells learn to cope with various drugs by defending themselves against the toxic effects. Cell walls hardens to retain stability and reduce toxic damage. But as your cells tough against drugs, gradually more and more can be consumed. Your tolerance increases.
In the long run, however, cells however cell walls breakdown. At this point, your cells not only lose their ability to keep toxins out but also become unable to retain essential nutrients. Many of them stop functioning all together or start functioning abnormally. That's when your organs (heart, brain, liver, or lungs) which are nothing more than a whole systems of cells, may begin to fail.
The problem with metabolism is that it is intimately connected to diet. Your body metabolizes food and where it breaks it down into its constituent parts to get more vital nutrients to all the cells.
To serve this purpose your body can metabolize many different types of foods and can learn how to gain nutrients from almost any kind of food you give it. Metabolism also helps to rid the body of unwanted toxins. The liver is the key organ in this process. The liver sees drugs as unwanted toxins and begins producing enzymes that will help illuminate them from the body. It produce a different combination of enzymes for each drug. Moreover the liver becomes extremely efficient at producing these enzymes. The more it sees a particular drug, the more efficiently it produces the enzymes that inactivate that drug.
Thus, a drug that you use often will get eliminated from the body with greater and greater efficiency. It's as if the liver begins to except that drug and has enzymes ready and waiting. This is a key reason for tolerance increase, that is, why it takes greater and greater doses of a drug to get the same original effects.
Yet your personal metabolism works differently from anyone else's. Studies show that each individual has a unique biochemical makeup and that individuals differ greatly from one another in the way they metabolize different foods, drugs, or toxins. To give you an idea how much possible variation there is, researches have presently identified over 3,000 metabolic substances called metabolites and over 1,100 enzymes.
Each individual has different proportions of all 4,100 of these bio-chemicals. Of the enzymes only about 30 are responsible for metabolizing all drugs. Also. the mixture bio-chemicals varies from each kind of food that you ingest, for example, your body uses different bio-chemicals to metabolize the different classes of food, meats, grains, vegetables, beans, fruits, and nuts. As you might have guessed you need a whole different bio-chemical preparedness to handle drugs, alcohol, sugars, chemicals additives, and toxins.
However, your body adjust to whatever diet you give it and the more most frequent foods in your diet come to be expected. Biochemical pathways become established the more they are used. Thus, if you body doesn't get an expected food, you actually begin to crave it. In fact, your body becomes addicted to the food you give to the most. Your metabolism so completely adjust to your regular diet that any change from this becomes increasingly difficult. Ask anyone who has attempted a major shift in diet.
For example, if you eat meat regularly, your metabolism will take a long time to adjust to a vegetarian diet. Although the same nutrients are available. Your body doesn't have the biochemical preparedness. The ability is there and your body can be metabolize vegetarian meals with no problem. But to gain the same efficiency with aw new diet, it can take from one to seven years.
The important thing to remember is this, metabolism depends on diet. For our purposes diet includes not only the nutritious food, but also the non-nutritious food such as sugar and alcohol as well as other substances such as chemical additives in food, environmental toxins, and drugs.
You can change your metabolism if you change your diet. Although it will take a long time to change your metabolism significantly, you will feel incredible improvements after just a few months. You will discover of the kinds of changes you need to make in the later chapter in my book.
We become addicted to drugs partly as a way to avoid life's misery. In our minds, at least, we become unwilling to suffer. Real life has loaded with suffering. We not only experience myriad of physical pains, but also we must cope psychological pain. Many events make us ache inside. Things happen that cause us to feel sad, to feel miserable angry, nervous, tense, disgusted, confused, weakened, tortured, cheated, abused, frightened, or upset. But we can avoid these feelings at least for the moment by using drugs.
We can do drugs and almost instantly feel high. We can forget about life for a while. We can experience pleasure, excitement, power, courage, thrills, joy, enchantment, and a sense of connection with other people and the world around us. Of course, in the long run drugs become less and less effective at bringing these benefits. Overtime the drugs themselves start causing the sufferings.
Soon we find we are using drugs to relieve the misery that drugs themselves have caused. This is known as the vicious cycle of addiction. It goes something like this, life doesn't feel too good. Bang! Try this drug or that drug and things feel better. Come down off that drug and things feel worse, just a little worse then I did before you took the drug in the first place.
No matter. Bang! Use the drug and feel good again. Gradually, your biochemistry changes. Your brain learns that it doesn't have to keep producing these chemicals that make your feel good. These chemicals keep appearing without the brain having to do any work. That's why each time you try to get off the drugs, you feel a little worse in the time before. It becomes harder and harder for you to get off the drugs, because you feel so bad whenever you try to stop.
And it all started with suffering. With your inability to accept suffering as an intimate part of life. You can break a drug habit anywhere along the way or never start with drugs at all. Simply by accepting life's suffering and facing the suffering head-on.
This doesn't mean that you will live a sad miserable or tormented life. There are plenty of ways you could face your suffering and then cope with it. In fact, once you learn these ways and begin using some of them you will feel as if your spirit has been renewed. Of course, it's your choice. If you choose drugs to cope with life suffering, you choose a buy now, pay later method. It works in the moment, but it just postpones the suffering and by postponing it, it builds up so that when you finally do face it, the suffering is immense.
The detoxification from drugs might take a week or two, but the longterm withdrawal, the period of time when your biochemistry and thus your physical and mental health returns to normal, it can take years. Luckily, during this time you gradually feel a little bit better everyday.
What can you do to get help? Well, you have many options. First you can find the advice and the information you need in my book, Addiction Education, You Have Questions, I Have Answers! You can take a look right now or today. Thanks for watching the health education video series number two. For additional information on our book Addiction Education, You Have Questions, I Have Answers! please, visit addictioneducation.net. See you in Health Education Video Series number three Are You Addicted? Not Sure? Take The Quiz and Find Out. I am Jimmy Oakley saying thanks till next time
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